(Crossposted at http://gopaint.wordpress.com)
These guys (and gals) make it too easy, don't they? The party of old white men is back at it. Despite it only being Tuesday, there have now been three new cases of racism within the GOP this week.
First, and perhaps most egregiously, the Young Republicans elected the utterly despicable Audra Shay to be their national chairman. As The Huffington Post reported:
After an effigy of Sarah Palin was hung, she said "What no 'Obama in a noose? ... I am wondering if the guys with the Palin noose would care if we had a bunch of homosexuals in a noose."
John Avlon, over at the Daily Beast originally broke the story that one of Shay's Facebook friends had posted the following:
"Obama Bin Lauden [sic] is the new terrorist... Muslim is on there side [sic]... need to take this country back from all of these mad coons... and illegals."
As Avlon reports:
Eight minutes after that, at 2:02, Shay weighed in on Piker’s comments: "You tell em Eric! lol."
Sounds an awful lot like Ms. Shay is supporting her friend's position that the "mad coons" (The Obama family, one would assume) have taken over the country.
The second case of GOP racism came from an unlikely (sort of) source: Michael Steele. The RNC Chair, nothing more than a token minority given a leadership position as a response to the election of President Obama, has quickly become famous for his outlandish and absurd comments. Remember this one?:
We want to convey that the modern-day GOP looks like the conservative party that stands on principles. But we want to apply them to urban-surburban hip-hop settings."
But, he elaborated with a laugh, "we need to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets."
Now obviously Steele recognizes the plight of the GOP with minorities. Right now, only 5% of Black voters identify themselves as Republicans. (And this has been the case since well before President Obama arrived on the scene). Since 2004, the GOP has lost huge ground with Latino voters. Ben Smith points out:
[McCain] got 31 percent of the Latino vote to the 44 percent that George W. Bush took in 2004, according to exit polls
Well, today, the dunce-like Steele was back at it; this time reinforcing stereotypes of African-Americans. His idea for the Republicans to gain ground with Black voters?
"fried chicken and potato salad."
It's stupefying, really it is. Steele, of all people, should understand the idiocy of reinforcing racial stereotypes.
The third incident comes from an unsurprising source - the noted racist Republican Senator Jeff Sessions. A quick recap of Sessions' racist past:
During a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he "used to think they [the Klan] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers."
Just one in a long line of racist anecdotes about Sessions. Another doozy:
J. Gerald Hebert, a career Justice Department lawyer, testified that Sessions had once called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." He said that they "forced civil rights down the throats of people."....Hebert also testified that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases.
Check out Rachel Maddow commenting on Sessions here
Which brings us to today's comments from Session at Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearing:
(Thanks to ThinkProgress and DKosTV for posting the video so quickly)
You voted not to reconsider the prior case. You voted to stay with the decision of the circuit, and in fact, your vote was the key vote. Had you voted with Judge Cabranes, himself of Puerto Rican ancestry, had you voted with him, you could have changed that case. So in truth you weren't bound by that case.
As I listened to this live, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. What does Judge Cabranes' ethnicity have to do with the court ruling question? Sessions, rather blatantly, is showing that he thinks Puerto Rican's are monolithic in their interpretations of the law. It's no different than saying "Well they all look alike" about a particular racial group.
In a party already struggling to overcome the label of being an exclusionary party, embracing racists like Shay and Sessions confirms what we already know: The GOP isn't interested in a "Big Tent" philosophy. They know that they can't win with minorities, because their core principles are against minorities' best interests. Whether it is the continued neglect of the urban poor, the ignored realities of gender discrimination in the workplace, the anti-gay rhetoric dressed up in the guise of religion or the anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim xenophobia and paranoia, the GOP time and time again shows itself to be an antiquated, loathsome dinosaur of a political party.